This blog is hosted by the free WordPress.com blog service. Part of the price for being free is the inability to install WordPress Plugins of my own choice. I can only use the ones WordPress.com makes available to everyone.

Oh, I’m using WordPress Plugins on this blog. Don’t you doubt it. They are just the ones all WordPress.com bloggers can use.

As part of the social community of WordPress.com fellow bloggers, we also have the Friend Surfer, Tag Surfer, and My Comments features, added on through the use of Plugins and add-on code especially for WordPress.com.

The Friend Surfer allows you to monitor what your favorite bloggers are blogging about on WordPress.com. You can add any WordPress.com URL and then set the time period you would like to see posts from “your friends”. You can set it since the last time they logged in, to a few hours or a week ago.

This is a great way of keeping track of your friends and their blogs, but also what key WordPress.com bloggers are saying. There are some top notch bloggers now using WordPress.com and they are shaking the web with their insights and resources.

Don’t have any friends on WordPress.com? Or don’t know where to start to find out who is blogging about what on WordPress.com? Or who is blogging about what interests you?

Try out the Tag Surfer option. Beginning with your blog’s categories, it shows you posts from those using the same categories. I have a category for Writing and I find a lot of fascinating fellow writers writing about writing on WordPress.com this way.

You can add or subtract the tags on your list without changing your blog’s categories. See what comes up when you add a new tag. You might find some fascinating bloggers.

My Comments is another important feature for the WordPress.com community. As part of the community, you can leave comments on other WordPress.com blogs. Actually, anyone can, but the joy of being a member of WordPress.com, it’s easier to keep track of your comments.

Your comments on WordPress.com are tracked through the My Comments feature. Comments to you and from you and in response to your comments are shown in a chronological order by post, with the comments threaded below. Find a new comment in response to yours? Click the Reply link and you are taken to the blog post to leave your comment.

If you want to spend a little money, you can add the ability to customize the look of your WordPress.com blog with the CSS Extra. You can also add more storage space, and even turn your blog into a commercial site with its own domain name – the options are many if you are willing to pay.

Still, there is a lot you can do without the CSS Extra to jazz up your WordPress.com blog in addition to the many Widgets and multimedia options. I explore a lot of these in WordPress.com Blog Bling, helping you cope with the lack of WordPress Plugins, javascript, and CSS in WordPress.com blogs, and showing you how I do the WordPress Plugin-like things on this blog.

Sometimes your limitations force you to be more creative. They also help you learn that there is a lot more you can do with a free WordPress.com blog than you might have thought.

For another look at what is possible on a WordPress.com blog without WordPress Plugins, see my friend, Engtech, and his amazing WordPress.com blog. I sure wish he’d share more about how he does all that!

Most of the WordPress Plugins which drive WordPress.com blogs are buried within the layers of code and not available to the general public. But then, full version WordPress bloggers have tons and tons of options, choices, and variety of WordPress Plugins to choose from.

WordPress.com blogs are a great way to get started in blogging. When you get to the point that you are ready to explore your blogging potential on your own, then WordPress and all the WordPress Plugins are waiting for you.

I have the same thoughts as Jane. Im thinking about leaving my self hosted WordPress and start over at WordPress.com. Seems like I will save a huge amount of time. But, it’s a shame that you can’t transfer old posts to the WordPress.com account…

Malin and Jane – IMHO, tweaking a template using the self hosted version of WordPress is easier. Well, its easier to get started with the default templates on WordPress.com (they are pretty), but I bet Lorelle’s customized CSS file is longer than your template’s PHP file!

As you found out, you can transfer from a full version WordPress blog into WordPress.com. But should you? (And never apologize for leaving comments, unless they are evil comments. 😉 )

If you are tired of the headaches of maintaining your own WordPress blog, and you just want to get back to the basics, WordPress.com is awesome.

But remember, it has some serious limitations. You have a 50 MB file storage size restriction. More will cost you. Host a few videos, MP3, or podcasts here and you will fill that up fast. There is almost no styling permitted within the post content area, which I mention above. There are a lot of other limits, but there are a lot of other reasons to blog here. Simplicity and focusing on the blogging and not the toys is a good reason.

As for the CSS on my blog, since all CSS in the CSS Extra package is restricted to the styles of the blog, not the content within it, it’s not much. A few colors in the backgrounds, headings, and so on. Very little. I like to keep this blog simple looking, featuring the text and content not the clutter. But thanks for noticing.

I’d sure like to dig into the template tags and do some fixing in there, though. That part really makes it hard for me to keep blogging here sometimes. 😉 It’s the price you pay for free.

Lorelle, I am not sure what you are trying to say here, since most of the features of WordPress.com code are probably within the WP-MU core code, not plugins. It is probably more resource efficient to put all of this in the core code, since when a WordPress blog runs, it has load all of the plugins, and if there are many to load, then performance will suffer.

I took a look at the Engtech blog. I am having a bit of trouble figuring out how he did a lot of things there. The home page was probably with tables and such, but the header links seem like a challenge to me.

WordPress.com is great and takes the hassle out of hosting your own WordPress blog. For those considering switching though, if you have any readership whatsoever in mainland China and value that readership you may want to think twice, as WordPress.com is blocked in China.

One great solution to the problem of censorship, however, would be to inform your readers of ways to get around the internet censorship in China before you switch. Point them to Tor, Anonymouse , Public Proxies or your solution of choice.

Once you’ve made the switch create a Feedburner feed for your blog. Feedburner feeds, unlike the feeds WordPress.com creates for your blog, are not blocked in China.

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